South Uist, General

SOUTH UIST (Uibhist a Deas) From the legendary heyday of the Clanranalds to the stark regime of the Gordons, South Uist has provided a potent source of inspiration for writers, poets and musicians of polarised sentiment. Part of the Clanranald inheritance of Garmoran, the island remained with this once powerful family from the 13 70s until 1838, when it was sold for £12 0,000, with Benbecula, to Col. Gordon of Cluny. The Gordon regime, which lasted until 1944 , is remembered for its infamous clearances, a programme of population redistribution which reached a peak between 1850 and 1854. Nearly 3,000 starving islanders were shipped off to Canada, while others were relocated to remote outposts on the barren east coast; a second wave followed in the 1880s. (For an eye-witness account, see p.372). Hummocky ruins hugging the contours of the land bear silent witness to the extent of these evictions; their memory leaves a deep scar. The fertile machair that fringes the Atlantic coast, re-shaped over centuries by wind and tide, has yielded prehistoric archaeological remains on a scale unrivalled in Britain. After about 200 bc, settlement patterns shifted. The linear system of cultivation adopted by townships dating back to the Iron Age can still be discerned running east-west across the (once wooded) landscape - from rough hill grazing ground to shell-strewn machair. The 1820s saw the beginning of what would become a familiar 338 pattern through the islands: the clearing of good west coast land to create enclosed farms. Each had its neat group of "improved" twostorey farmhouse and steadings built of stone, lime and slate. Tenant farmers were mostly incomers able to afford the higher rents, part of a close-knit group that included the factor and minister. Separated from the Gaelic-speaking Roman Catholic majority by language, religion and wealth, they nonetheless controlled island affairs. The crofting protest movement of the 1880s turned the wheel full circle. Farms that had been crofting townships before the Clearances were re-formed as crofts, and their farmhouses were subdivided to accommodate crofters. Not until the 1920s, however, were the last farms - Bornish, Glendale, Askernish and Drimore - finally broken up. The people of South Uist were generally poorer than their neighbours - Barra for instance benefitted from a successful fishing industry. In 1891, 70 per cent of their houses had livestock under the same roof (this figure had declined to eight per cent by 1903). Thatched houses remained the norm for much longer in South Uist - many seen today were built only at the turn of last century, their location reflecting the patterns of population resettlement following the Clearances. More people here progressed directly from thatched to kithouse dwellings, skipping the interim stage of 'improved' one and a half storey gabled cottage with straightskewed roof of slate, felt or zinc. Visitors today tend to deplore the prevalence of unsightly bungalows designed in alien materials for a flat, suburban landscape. Yet these houses represent a new generation electing to stay; it is the calibre of designs marketed by the kithouse manufacturers that should be regretted, not the instinct for change. But now a welcome new phenomenum is sweeping the Uists, and from Eochar to South Lochboisdale a growing number of thatched houses have been restored as holiday lets.

Taken from "Western Seaboard: An Illustrated Architectural Guide", by Mary Miers, 2008. Published by the Rutland Press http://www.rias.org.uk